One giant blunder for mankind: how NASA lost moon pictures

Inset the high-quality footage that was transmitted to
Parkes. Main..."There will only ever be one first moon walk", John
Sarkissian at the Parkes telescope.

Richard MaceyAugust 5, 2006

THE heart-stopping moments when Neil Armstrong took his first
tentative steps onto another world are defining images of the 20th
century: grainy, fuzzy, unforgettable.

But just 37 years after Apollo 11, it is feared the magnetic
tapes that recorded the first moon walk - beamed to the world via
three tracking stations, including Parkes's famous "Dish" - have
gone missing at NASA's Goddard Space Centre in Maryland.

A desperate search has begun amid concerns the tapes will
disintegrate to dust before they can be found.

It is not widely known that the Apollo 11 television broadcast
from the moon was a high-quality transmission, far sharper than the
blurry version relayed instantly to the world on that July day in
1969.

Among those battling to unscramble the mystery is John
Sarkissian, a CSIRO scientist stationed at Parkes for a decade. "We
are working on the assumption they still exist," Mr Sarkissian told
the Herald.

"Your guess is a good as mine as to where they are."

Mr Sarkissian began researching the role of Parkes in Apollo
11's mission in 1997, before the movie The Dish was made.
However, when he later contacted NASA colleagues to ask about the
tapes, they could not be found.

"People may have thought 'we have tapes of the moon walk, we
don't need these'," said the scientist who hopes a new, intensive
hunt will locate them.

If they can be found, he proposes making digitalised copies to
treat the world to a very different view of history.

But the searchers may be running out of time. The only known
equipment on which the original analogue tapes can be decoded is at
a Goddard centre set to close in October, raising fears that even
if they are found before they deteriorate, copying them may be
impossible.

"We want the public to see it the way the moon walk was meant to
be seen," Mr Sarkissian said.

"There will only ever be one first moon walk."

Originally stored at Goddard, the tapes were moved in 1970 to
the US National Archives. No one knows why, but in 1984 about 700
boxes of space flight tapes there were returned to Goddard.

"We have the documents to say they were withdrawn, but no one
knows exactly where they went," Mr Sarkissian said.

Many people involved had retired or died.

Also among tapes feared missing are the original recordings of
the other five Apollo moon landings. The format used by the
original pictures beamed from the moon was not compatible with
commercial technology used by television networks. So the images
received at Parkes, and at tracking stations near Canberra and in
California, were played on screens mounted in front of conventional
television cameras.

"The quality of what you saw on TV at home was substantially
degraded" in the process, Mr Sarkissian said, creating the ghostly
images of Armstrong and Aldrin that strained the eyes of hundreds
of millions of people watching around the world.

Even Polaroid photographs of the screen that showed the original
images received by Parkes are significantly sharper than what the
public saw. While the technique looks primitive today, Mr
Sarkissian said it was the best solution that 1969 technology
offered.

Among the few who saw the original high-quality broadcast was
David Cooke, a Parkes control room engineer in 1969.

"I can still see the screen," Mr Cook, 74, said. "I was amazed,
the quality was fairly good."